NB: This post is part of the “Piercing the Monetary Veil” symposium. Other contributions can be found here.

Lua Yuille and Rohan Grey —

Money and property law are mutually constitutive. Property rights are defined and valued in terms of their relationship to monetary instruments, while whether something counts as a monetary instrument for this or that purpose is itself a result of bundling property rights a certain way. Yet property law treats money as opaque: a neutral measuring stick that happens to prove useful in the process of doing the real work of property.* This is partly because money is grossly under-theorized and misunderstood by property law scholars. In property law, “money provides the unit in which prices appear, supplies a medium of exchange, and acts as a store of value”, but it does so as if by magic. Unlike students of economics, who are introduced to money through the self-consciously ahistorical fable that money evolved as an evolutionary response to the inefficiency and inadequacy of barter, American law students are not formally introduced to money at all. Money is taken as an idea that needs no articulation or unpacking. The result is a ‘functional monetary illiteracy’ that fails to conceptualize the complicated relationship between money and property law, serving to obscure the role of the state and of private power in defining each.**